Aleksei Novichkov
Senior Product Designer · currently in Belgrade, Serbia
Professional Summary
Senior Product Designer focused on productivity and collaboration software. I have 13 years of experience designing SaaS products. My work includes a task manager, CRM, and accounting software. I excel at designing tools people rely on every day. I enjoy simplifying complex features to create a clear, effective user experience.
I am also a frontend developer, which allows me to design solutions that are realistic to implement and polished in the browser. This enables seamless design handoff, close collaboration with engineers, and consistently high-quality UX in production.
Employment History
Product Designer at Buddy.ai
Jun 2022 – Apr 2025 (2 years 10 months)
Voice-based AI English tutor for kids, designed as an interactive, game-like experience.
Parental Experience
- Onboarding Optimization: I led a comprehensive redesign of the parental onboarding process, resulting in significant improvements in trial and purchase conversion rates.
- Compliance and Certification: Ensured COPPA compliance in the mobile app UI and helped obtain kidSAFE certification.
- Paywall Experimentation: Conducted extensive A/B testing on paywall designs, learning from both successful and unsuccessful tests.
- Complete Website Redesign: Completely redesigned the company website, aligning it with different audience segments (English as a foreign language, Early learning program, and Speech therapy). This new structure boosted traffic and enabled more effective marketing experiments.
Kids’ Experience
- Voice interaction engagement & clarity: I designed a prominent, playful “Magic of Voice” indicator that clearly signals listening states, reduces confusion about turn-taking, and makes voice input feel safe and inviting. To reinforce this behavior, we linked immediate rewards to spoken responses.
- Retention improvement: Integrated rewards into daily dialogues to encourage habitual use and improve short- and long-term retention.
Product Design Lead at Finolog
Mar 2016 – Jan 2022 (5 years 11 months)
Accounting platform for small businesses with automated bank imports, cash flow forecasting, and financial reporting.
Product Design
- As the sole designer in the early stages, I defined the product’s UX, UI, and visual language, and led it from an MVP to a mature SaaS tool.
- Planned and conducted multiple in-depth UX research studies. These insights shaped core product flows, reduced onboarding friction, and informed several roadmap cycles.
- Hired, mentored, and led a junior product designer, building Finolog’s first in-house design function.
- Redesigned key flows to help users reach their “a-ha moment” faster — particularly the journey from data aggregation to generating their first Cashflow report.
- User onboarding: Interviewed newly converted customers, identified their goals and early struggles, and created onboarding guides (using Intercom Product Tours and custom UI) to support activation and reduce support load.
- Created the initial help-center content and product explanations before a support team existed, giving users a reliable foundation for self-service onboarding.
Frontend Development
- Contributed hands-on as a frontend developer (Vue.js) for several product features during the early startup stage.
- Built and maintained the Finolog marketing website using Nuxt.
Communication & Marketing Design
- Owned visual direction across product and marketing.
- Supervised freelance designers and maintained visual consistency.
- Designed the main website, multiple promo pages, and visual communication materials.
- Helped launch numerous educational initiatives, including courses teaching financial accounting for small businesses; educational programs for financial consultants using Finolog.
Megaplan
Leading B2B SaaS platform in the Russian market for CRM, task, and project management used by small and mid-sized companies.
Lead Product Designer
Nov 2014 – Mar 2016 (1 year 5 months)
- I have completed the design of the new Megaplan mobile app, which the previous lead designer had started.
- Hired and mentored two designers at the company.
- Before leaving, I developed a design concept for Megaplan’s evolution, which became the basis for the service’s current design.
Product Designer
Jan 2012 – Nov 2014 (2 years 11 months)
Megaplan CRM redesign
- Redesigned core CRM modules (Clients, Deals), contributing to the launch of a modernized UI used by thousands of SMB teams.
- Simplified complex CRM workflows by reducing redundant settings, roles, and edge cases that had accumulated over years of feature growth.
- Collaborated closely with product managers and engineers to evolve the CRM while maintaining backward compatibility for existing customers.
Zettaplan task-manager (initially Megaplan 2)
- Contributed to the design of Zettaplan, a next-generation collaboration platform focused on tasks, projects, and contextual communication.
- Redesigned the core task experience multiple times, optimizing for high-frequency actions such as commenting, delegation, subtasks, mentions, and file sharing.
- Helped shape an Inbox-centric workflow, enabling users to interact with tasks, discussions, and notifications in a single, unified view.
- Designed a permission and access model based on company structure, including inheritance rules that balanced simplicity and privacy needs.
- Reduced a complex role system to three clear permission levels, lowering cognitive load for admins and end users.
- Worked on information architecture and navigation, including column-based layouts, tree views, and focus management between lists and detail views.
- Contributed to a reusable components library, improving UI consistency and development speed across the product.
- Partnered closely with engineers, frequently refining interactions, micro-UX details, and UI polish directly during implementation.
Details
Belgrade, Serbia
novichkov.alexey@gmail.com
Portfolio
LinkedIn
GitHub
Education
Voronezh State Technical University
Diploma in “Information Systems and Technologies”
2002–2007
Languages
English (Professional Working)
Russian (Native)
Skills
Product Design (B2B SaaS)
UI Design
User Experience Design
Prototiping: Figma, HTML/JS
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Design Systems
Usability Testing
User Research
Frontent Development